This Beloved Matriarch lived a richly-fulfilling life in the course of which she served her nation well in various roles, and yet found time to give and receive filial attention and affection. She was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a time when the Cold War was becoming increasingly hot in southern Africa, her country in the eye of the storm of geopolitical conflagrations because it was the most frontline of the Frontline States and found itself in an unavoidable confrontation with the world's most abominable heresy that successive apartheid regimes forced upon the Black majority in South Africa.
It was a measure of her astute command of diplomatic skills that America's civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson - in Botswana as part of a whirlwind tour of southern Africa - aptly remarked that Botswana was "in the belly of the beast" at the end of a meeting with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe. I had done my part in getting Jackson's large entourage to cancel their bookings and storm out of the Gaborone Sun Hotel and Casino in protest shortly after their arrival on September 14, 1986. With the foyer a beehive of activity as Batswana thronged Gaborone Sun to welcome the heroes of America's civil rights movement, I had vaulted onto the counter and made an extemporaneous but impassioned speech about how commandos of apartheid South Africa - come to kill and main people in their sleep in the dead of night - were frequent habitues of the facility; people whose 'sin' was their dedication to the cause of freedom for all and Batswana whose 'crime' was to respond to the international call for third countries and their citizens to give men, material and money to legitimate liberation movements in exercise of the rectitude of resistance to the essential abomination that was apartheid and the barbaric regime in Pretoria that enjoyed the support of the outrageously two-timing United States, Western Europe and Zionist Israel in defiance of the call for more sanctions and total isolation by means of thinly-veiled sanctions-busting and rebel sporting tours. Many years later, I was often fortunate to be able to join Billy Chiepe on visits to Dr Gaositwe Chiepe's tastefully-furnished home that is nestled in the middle of the well-appointed Extension 9 neighbourhood near Northside Primary School in Gaborone, and there bask in the sunshine of her reflections on Botswana's recent history and views on an array of public affairs. Besuited legations
